Many people privately messaged me to say that they are very interested in this topic; some people said that they or their teams are already very close to the UGD model, focusing on users Growth, retention and other important business metrics.
But in fact, UGD is not just about focusing on business growth. UGD and UED have huge differences in thinking, goals, directions, and methods.
First of all, UED is mainly problem-driven, while UGD is value-driven
The problem-driven way of thinking is believed to be familiar to all UEDs: when we try to improve the product, we always collect problems from the business side and users, then summarize the problems, form design goals, and then give designs around the design goals. scheme, and finally verify the effect through the data.
If you don't consider growth, there is nothing wrong with this model, after all, it is not for growth; but if you want to be "user-centric, growth-oriented" as mentioned in the previous article, then this model is obviously far from enough.
After a long period of exploration and accumulation, we gradually discovered the following pattern (we call it "lean closed loop"):
First, we "start with the end in mind" to put forward the indicators that we want to grow (this indicator represents the overall value of b2b data the product, including the improvement of business value), then put forward hypotheses (what you do may improve the index), and then consider how to proceed around the hypothesis Design and decompose (for example, optimizing a module may improve indicators, but there are many ways to optimize the module, we disassemble it one by one), and finally prioritize the overall arrangement, go online and verify one by one.
In this way, it is not only possible for us to continuously improve the indicator, but also to have a very clear understanding of what is causing the indicator to improve. This closed-loop approach effectively improves growth efficiency.
Due to space limitations, I mainly state the concept in this article, and may give some examples in later articles to help you understand. Now everyone just needs to remember that if you really want to be growth-oriented, you must improve the original working model and use a closed-loop approach to target and efficiently improve indicators. Of course, this does not contradict the original "user-centered" idea, and we still need to combine it when considering the design scheme. This is "user-centric, growth-oriented".
Secondly, UED supports services, UGD selects services
"Choice is more important than effort", and if we want to be growth-oriented, it's hard for us to do that through pure support work. We need to take the initiative and combine the advantages of design thinking (rigorous, heavy thinking, heavy analysis, heavy methodology) to find the work that is most likely to help improve the business.
For example, originally, most of our team’s manpower was devoted to app optimization (support work). Later, we found that there was less and less room for improving performance through app optimization, so we decided to focus on new and activation (active attack). Now the company's operating expenses on new promotions (precision marketing) are very considerable. If we can improve the conversion of the marketing landing page, it can bring huge benefits to the company (through the lean closed-loop method, we improved the conversion of this page in the test channel last year) more than 40%).
Of course, if there is no specific method to support, this process depends entirely on the subjective judgment of the leader, which is unreliable and difficult to inherit. So I combined the AARRR model with the user experience map to form a user growth map to help everyone learn how to make judgments.
There is actually a lot to say about the user growth map, which is explained in detail in my new book, so I won’t say more here.
Many people may question: We are so busy every day that we can’t do the support work, how can we find time to actively look for opportunities? In fact, there are many ways to improve the efficiency of support work, which is another topic (please pay attention to the follow-up article). Take our team as an example. The use of smart component libraries has greatly reduced labor costs, allowing us to spend more energy on innovation. Before I came to Yirendai, 100% of the team's work was support; last year, about 80% of the team's energy was devoted to support; this year, the proportion of support will be further reduced, while more and more innovative projects will be launched.
Third, the UED method is stable and the UGD method is flexible
I have experienced many types of products over the years, from different stages to different categories. I found that compared with the differences between types, the differences of products at different stages have a greater impact on product design.
Because the product goals of each stage are different (the primary task in the exploration stage is to survive; in the growth stage, the primary task is to surpass competitors and live well; in the mature stage, the pursuit of maximizing commercial value), and design as one of the links, its Goals are necessarily influenced by product goals.
Now, few designers will consciously adopt different design ideas for different stages of the product. Instead, they selected similar indicators, similar ideas, and similar methods, and then found that the effect was not ideal but did not know the problem.
In fact, in the face of the exploration period (introduction period) from 0 to 1, what we need is a saw, because everything is difficult at the beginning, we must have the courage to make big moves; in the face of the rapid development period, what we need is a Use an axe to help us make drastic improvements; in the face of the mature stage of development entering a bottleneck, what we need is a small file, carefully crafted and improved products to find the best results, at this time, a little too much force may be counterproductive. Effect.
So as a UGD, we will always carry a toolbox with us and choose the right tool according to the different situations of the product, instead of just using a fixed idea. I know that everyone must want to know specific methods and cases, but due to space limitations, the methods here can only be highly refined and pointed to. In short, if there is no complete growth system to support, it is difficult to become a real UGD.
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#Columnist#
Liu Jin (WeChat official account: Relish), everyone is a product manager columnist, founder of Yirendai UGD team, former Alibaba interaction design expert, NetEase e-commerce design director; best-selling book "Broken Cocoon into a Butterfly—— The author of "The Growth Road of User Experience Designer